


Family Dinner

by skye_42



Category: The Folk of the Air - Holly Black
Genre: Angst, F/M, cardan and Madoc have a fight, family dinner gone wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:35:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26003539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skye_42/pseuds/skye_42
Summary: A look into why Cardan and Madoc don’t like each other.
Relationships: Jude Duarte/Cardan Greenbriar
Comments: 7
Kudos: 144
Collections: favorite on TFOTA





	Family Dinner

**Author's Note:**

> This was a fic I wrote for a request

It was no secret that Cardan and Madoc disliked one another. Anybody with eyes could see how they glared at each other over their wine glasses whenever they had to dine together. But Cardan loved his wife, and his wife clearly had some strange familial feelings that she was confused by, and so that meant that he never complained when Jude dragged him to dinner. After all, it wouldn’t happen for long, and Madoc would be out of his life unless Jude lifted the exile. 

Still, that didn’t change the fact that his forehead always hurt from how strongly he frowned at dinner. 

It was quickly approaching Yule and the Elfhame monarchs had agreed to take a day’s break from planning revels and attending meetings to head to the mortal world for an early holiday meal. Cardan had never celebrated Christmas, and Jude hadn’t celebrated it in years, but Oak was insistent on trying out the new holiday and Taryn was so far along in her pregnancy that they all knew she wouldn’t be getting out much in a few weeks. 

That’s why, against everything Cardan wanted, he found himself glaring down his father-in-law. 

They had to put in some work to properly stare at each other. With Madoc at the head of the table and Oriana opposite him, Cardan was at a disadvantage. He was sitting next to his wife, across from the Ghost, and so he had to turn his head to flash Madoc sour looks. Jude had picked up on the tension—she always did—and was gripping his thigh so tightly that he knew he’d have bruises in the morning. 

Madoc took a break from glaring to ask some question about the kingdom, one that Jude answered with all the grace of a seasoned monarch. Cardan was so distracted by using the moment to take a sip of his wine that it wasn’t until the room descended into silence that he realized his wife had left him room to speak. 

“My apologies, my mind was elsewhere,” he said, coming back to the conversation and offering his wife a sheepish grin. He only looked sheepish around her, only apologized genuinely for her. Anywhere else, with anyone else, he would’ve been content to continue ignoring them. But not his Jude, never his Jude. 

“It’s alri—“

“Typical,” Madoc mumbled under his breath, loud enough to interrupt Jude. 

Cardan and Jude both bristled. 

“And what is that supposed to mean?” Jude asked, her fiercely overprotective nature cutting through any hope of maintaining diplomacy. This wasn’t a state dinner, she could rip people to shreds if she wanted. 

Cardan laid a hand on her back, his long fingers stretching effortlessly over the delicate silk of her dress as he wordlessly told her that he’d take care of this. 

Across the table, Taryn was considering faking labor to have an excuse to get herself and Ghost out. Down the table, Oak was secretively raising his brand new phone up past his plate, already recording for posterity (as he’d started doing after Madoc “accidentally” dropped a wine glass on Cardan a month ago). Directly to Cardan’s right, Oriana was eyeing the wine glass in front of her, wondering if anyone would notice her turning the whole thing bottoms up. 

Madoc stared Cardan down and the entire room grew even tenser. “I said it was typical,” he finally stated, blinking matter-of-factly. “As in, it’s typical for you to leave all conscious thought to Jude while you go off in your own world.” 

“Madoc, dear, don’t speak to our king that way,” Oriana pointedly warned. 

“I’ve no king, I’m a man in exile,” he shot back instantly. “All I have is a son-in-law who isn’t worth my daughter’s spit.”

Vivi cooly wrapped her arm around Heather’s shoulders, looking for the quickest exit. 

Cardan, moving quickly, slid his hand from Jude’s back to her thigh and dug his fingers into her skin to keep her seated as he looked his father-in-law up and down. 

“I don’t see why there’s so much animosity for a subject we agree on,” he calmly announced. “I’ve made it quite clear that I feel undeserving of the gift it is to be Jude’s husband.”

Madoc blanched a little, opening his mouth to say something. 

Cardan cut him off. “Though what confuses me is the fact that you don’t seem to feel the same way about being her father. You act like you’re entitled to the roll, like you’ve offered her something she wouldn’t exist without.”

He reached down and grabbed his wine glass, swirling it around before taking a delicate sip to build the tension. 

“Like you somehow have done anything other than put Jude in danger,” he continued, studying the way the light glinted off his painted nails before turning back to Madoc. “Like you were somehow key to her success.”

If they were in Elfhame, this would be about the time that guards would move to secure Madoc to keep him from attacking the king. But they weren’t in Elfhame, so no one stopped him from slamming his fists on the table and standing tall, looking ready for a fight. 

Cardan didn’t give him the satisfaction of rising to face him. Instead, he remained comfortably seated beside his wife—who was shooting rapid glances between him and her father. 

“I raised her!”

“You stole her,” Cardan shot back, voice betraying his disgust. “You took her from a loving mother and father, from the safety of the mortal world, and you threw her to the wolves. You gave her and her sister up to the gentry for slaughter and you dare to call that raising?”

And there it was, the genesis of Cardan’s hatred for Madoc. No matter how many family dinners they suffered through, how much time passed, he’d always despise his father-in-law for what he’d done to Jude when she was no more than a defenseless human child. 

Jude had been born into a loving family, she’d had a mother and father who adored not only each other, but also their children. She’d deserved that for the rest of her life, she’d deserved the safety that her human birth should’ve afforded her. 

But no, she’d been forced—at the tender age of seven—to watch the violent murder of both her parents, and then she’d been stolen away to Faerie and thrown to the wolves that made up the gentry. A lifetime of scorn and suffering that could’ve been avoided if Madoc hadn’t been so entitled and rash.

“I seem to remember your torment was always the worst,” Madoc looked like a vein was about to pop in his forehead as his voice lowered dangerously. “You trapped my daughter in a river of nixies, you drugged her and forced her to strip in front of her classmates—“

“The everapple incident wasn’t my doing.”

Cardan had been a terrible person—arguably still was when he needed to be—and he knew he’d been evil to Jude when they were children. But he’d never engineered a situation where Jude would be both inebriated and in danger. Even when he was still trying to convince himself that he hated her, her safety was always his number one concern. 

“You exiled Jude when she needed you most.”

Cardan’s eye twitched. “To protect her from you. To protect her from us.”

And then he finally stood, setting down his wine glass and turning to face Madoc. His oil-slick eyes swirled with hatred and he was thankful they weren’t in Elfhame, solely because he knew that, if they were, he would’ve already been surrounded by poisonous plants. 

“You didn’t see her after the Undersea, never saw how sick she was,” he growled. “I sent her away to give her time to heal, to give her the chance to fall in love with the mortal world again in the hopes that she would stay here where she was safe.”

He stepped back and pushed his chair in, pulling Jude’s out and helping her up. 

“But my darling wife returned, because she’s headstrong and she’s never cared much for her own safety. I won’t lie to you, I’m thankful for it. I don’t think I would’ve survived without her.”

He went to the coatrack and grabbed Jude’s fur before walking back to wrap it around her shoulders. 

“But then you took her from me.”

Madoc opened his mouth. 

“Granted, you thought she was Taryn,” Cardan acknowledged. “I suppose you, her so-called loving father, never put in the work to tell the difference.”

Jude was staring at her husband, she saw how his hands shook in anger. 

“But when you figured it out, when you finally looked at your daughter and saw Jude, that’s when you truly lost any hope of being a father.” Cardan looked back to Madoc, tears of fury wetting his eyes. “Because when you were faced with your teenaged daughter, the girl you stole and brought up and taught, you tried to kill her.”

Memories of Jude crashing from the rafters flirted through his mind and he bit his cheek against the wave of nausea it always brought up. 

“You gutted your child and left her to die,” he whispered. “You ran her through and you dare to say I’m the one undeserving of her?” 

Jude didn’t know what to say as she looked at her husband, as she felt his fingers digging into the flesh of her arm. She’d never seen him so raw with emotion, never heard him discuss his hatred of Madoc. 

She didn’t fight as her husband pushed her towards the door. So lost in her own thoughts was she that she didn’t notice Cardan stop to whisper in Madoc’s ear. 

“I look forward to the day Jude stops coming to the mortal world,” he admitted, “because then I know I’ll no longer have to worry about you putting her in danger.”

“And what about you?” Madoc asked, a tinge if desperation in his voice. “How will I know that you’re no longer endangering her? You, who have always been undeserving of her?”

“Your peace of mind isn’t my problem. Her’s is.”


End file.
